VirusTotal[2] is an awesome website. If you don’t know about it already, you have been missing out on life — VirusTotal allows users to scan a file with 40+ anti-virus/anti-malware engines. VirusTotal recently introduced an update to the website. This update brings many goodies. Let’s take a look at what they are:

New interface. VirusTotal has a new interface; it is more modern and streamlined.

New file size limit. In the past VirusTotal only accepted files that were 20 MB or smaller in size. That limit has now been increased to 32 MB. Oh happy days.

New back-end engine. VirusTotal has now been migrated to Google Apps Engine. This basically means VirusTotal runs on Google’s cloud services. For most of us normal users, it makes no difference if VirusTotal is running on Google Apps Engine or some other cloud service. However Google Apps Engine allows VirusTotal to scale better when the need arises, ensuring a better service level; plus scans and analyzes should now be faster thanks to Google’s infrastructure.

Other changes. Aside from the major changes mentioned above, other changes include:

Thanks to HTML5, VirusTotal now computes the hash of files locally thus if you are looking to scan a file that has already been scanned by VirusTotal, you don’t have to upload the file before you are given the ability to view the older scan results.

The URL scanner uses more engines now, bringing the total to 19.

Releasing version 2 of the public API, improving responsiveness among other things.